TED-Ed
TED-Ed: The science of smog - Kim Preshoff
On July 26, 1943, Los Angeles was blanketed by a thick gas that stung people’s eyes and blocked out the Sun. Panicked residents believed their city had been attacked using chemical warfare. But the cloud wasn’t an act of war. It was...
TED-Ed
TED-Ed: History vs. Napoleon Bonaparte - Alex Gendler
After the French Revolution erupted in 1789, Europe was thrown into chaos. Neighboring countries' monarchs feared they would share the fate of Louis XVI and attacked the new Republic, while at home, extremism and mistrust between...
Curated Video
Age & Aging: Crash Course Sociology
People are getting older – not just in the individual sense, but the human population itself. Today we’re going to explore those shifting patterns and their implications. We’ll go over the biological, psychological, and cultural aspects...
TED-Ed
TED-ED: What makes a poem a poem? - Melissa Kovacs
What exactly makes a poem - a poem? Poets themselves have struggled with this question, often using metaphors to approximate a definition. Is a poem a little machine? A firework? An echo? A dream? Melissa Kovacs shares three recognizable...
TED-Ed
TED-Ed: What really happened to the Library of Alexandria? - Elizabeth Cox
2,300 years ago, the rulers of Alexandria set out to fulfill a very audacious goal: to collect all the knowledge in the world under one roof. In its prime, the Library of Alexandria housed an unprecedented number of scrolls and attracted...
TED-Ed
TED-ED: What caused the French Revolution? - Tom Mullaney
What rights do people have, and where do they come from? Who gets to make decisions for others, and on what authority? And how can we organize society to meet people's needs? Tom Mullaney shows how these questions challenged an entire...
TED-Ed
TED-ED: A brief history of alcohol - Rod Phillips
Nobody knows exactly when humans began to create fermented beverages. The earliest known evidence comes from 7,000 BCE in China, where residue in clay pots has revealed that people were making an alcoholic beverage from fermented rice,...
TED-Ed
TED-ED: How to use rhetoric to get what you want - Camille A. Langston
How do you get what you want, using just your words? Aristotle set out to answer exactly that question over two thousand years ago with a treatise on rhetoric. Camille A. Langston describes the fundamentals of deliberative rhetoric and...
TED-Ed
TED-Ed: How to make a mummy - Len Bloch
As anyone who's seen a mummy knows, ancient Egyptian priests went to a lot of trouble to evade decomposition. But how successful were they? Len Bloch details the mummification process and examines its results thousands of years later.
TED-Ed
TED-Ed: What are the universal human rights? - Benedetta Berti
The basic idea of human rights is that each one of us, no matter who we are or where we are born, is entitled to the same basic rights and freedoms. That may sound straightforward enough, but it gets incredibly complicated as soon as...
TED-Ed
TED-Ed: Did Ancient Troy really exist? - Einav Zamir Dembin
When Homer's Iliad was first written down in the eighth century BCE, the story of the Trojan war was already an old one. From existing oral tradition, audiences knew the tales of the long siege, the duels outside the city walls, and the...
TED-Ed
TED-Ed: Why the metric system matters - Matt Anticole
For the majority of recorded human history, units like the weight of a grain or the length of a hand weren't exact and varied from place to place. Now, consistent measurements are such an integral part of our daily lives that it's hard...
TED-Ed
TED-ED: Why incompetent people think they're amazing - David Dunning
How good are you with money? What about reading people's emotions? How healthy are you, compared to other people you know? Knowing how our skills stack up against others is useful in many ways. But psychological research suggests that...
TED-Ed
TED-ED: The great conspiracy against Julius Caesar - Kathryn Tempest
On March 15th, 44 BCE, Roman dictator Julius Caesar was assassinated by a group of about 60 of his own senators. Why did these self-titled Liberators want him dead? And why did Brutus, whose own life had been saved by Caesar, join in the...
TED-Ed
TED-ED: The myth of King Midas and his golden touch - Iseult Gillespie
In Greek mythology, King Midas is known as a rogue ruler whose antics bemused his people and irritated the Gods. Many know the classic story of Midas's golden touch, but the foolish king was also known for his unusual pair of ears....
TED-Ed
TED-Ed: The hidden worlds within natural history museums - Joshua Drew
When you think of natural history museums, you might picture exhibits filled with ancient lifeless things, like dinosaurs or meteorites. But behind that educational exterior, there are hidden laboratories where scientific breakthroughs...
TED-Ed
TED-ED: Why should you read James Joyce's "Ulysses"? - Sam Slote
James Joyce's "Ulysses" is widely considered to be both a literary masterpiece and one of the hardest works of literature to read. It inspires such devotion that once a year, thousands of people all over the world dress up like the...
TED-Ed
TED-Ed: Where does gold come from? - David Lunney
Did you know that gold is extraterrestrial? Instead of arising from our planet's rocky crust, it was actually cooked up in space and is present on Earth because of cataclysmic stellar explosions called supernovae. CERN Scientist David...
Curated Video
Do You Really Have Two Brains?
Are you a left-brained person or a right-brained person? Spoiler: You're neither.
TED-Ed
TED-ED: Why should you read "The Handmaid's Tale"? - Naomi R. Mercer
Margaret Atwood's speculative fiction masterpiece The Handmaid's Tale explores the consequences of complacency and how power can be wielded unfairly. Atwood's chilling vision of a dystopian regime has captured readers' imaginations since...
TED-Ed
TED-Ed: An unsung hero of the civil rights movement - Christina Greer
Learn about the life of Bayard Rustin, a leader in the Civil Rights Movement, a gay rights activist, and one of Martin Luther King’s closest advisors. -- In 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech at the March...
TED-Ed
TED-ED: Mansa Musa, one of the wealthiest people who ever lived - Jessica Smith
Mansa Musa, the 14th century African king of the Mali Empire, is said to have amassed a fortune that possibly made him one of the wealthiest people who ever lived. Jessica Smith tells the story of how Mansa Musa literally put his empire...
TED-Ed
TED-ED: The myth of Icarus and Daedalus - Amy Adkins
In mythological ancient Greece, Icarus flew above Crete on wings made from wax and feathers, defying the laws of man and nature. To witnesses on the ground, he looked like a god, and he felt like one too. But, in his society, the line...
TED-Ed
TED-ED: The Atlantic slave trade: What too few textbooks told you - Anthony Hazard
Slavery has occurred in many forms throughout the world, but the Atlantic slave trade -- which forcibly brought more than 10 million Africans to the Americas -- stands out for both its global scale and its lasting legacy. Anthony Hazard...